Linux "wget" Command Line Options and Examples

The non-interactive network downloader.

GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies. Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on.

Usage:

wget [option]... [URL]...

Command Line Options:

-x,

wget -o log -- -xThe options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the convention that specifying an empty list clears its value. This can beuseful to clear the .wgetrc settings. For instance, if your .wgetrc sets "exclude_directories" to /cgi-bin, the following examplewill first reset it, and then set it to exclude /~nobody and /~somebody. You can also clear the lists in .wgetrc.wget -X " -X /~nobody,/~somebodyMost options that do not accept arguments are boolean options, so named because their state can be captured with a yes-or-no("boolean") variable. For example, --follow-ftp tells Wget to follow FTP links from HTML files and, on the other hand, --no-globtells it not to perform file globbing on FTP URLs. A boolean option is either affirmative or negative (beginning with --no). Allsuch options share several properties.Unless stated otherwise, it is assumed that the default behavior is the opposite of what the option accomplishes. For example, thedocumented existence of --follow-ftp assumes that the default is to not follow FTP links from HTML pages.Affirmative options can be negated by prepending the --no- to the option name; negative options can be negated by omitting the --no-prefix. This might seem superfluous---if the default for an affirmative option is to not do something, then why provide a way toexplicitly turn it off? But the startup file may in fact change the default. For instance, using "follow_ftp = on" in .wgetrc makesWget follow FTP links by default, and using --no-follow-ftp is the only way to restore the factory default from the command line.Basic Startup Options


                            wget -x, ...

--version

Display the version of Wget.


                            wget --version ...

--help

Print a help message describing all of Wget's command-line options.


                            wget --help ...

--background

Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via the -o, output is redirected to wget-log.


                            wget --background ...

--execute

Execute command as if it were a part of .wgetrc. A command thus invoked will be executed after the commands in .wgetrc, thustaking precedence over them. If you need to specify more than one wgetrc command, use multiple instances of -e.Logging and Input File Options


                            wget --execute ...

--output-file

Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported to standard error.


                            wget --output-file ...

--append-output

Append to logfile. This is the same as -o, only it appends to logfile instead of overwriting the old log file. If logfile doesnot exist, a new file is created.


                            wget --append-output ...

--debug

Turn on debug output, meaning various information important to the developers of Wget if it does not work properly. Your systemadministrator may have chosen to compile Wget without debug support, in which case -d will not work. Please note that compilingwith debug support is always safe---Wget compiled with the debug support will not print any debug info unless requested with -d.


                            wget --debug ...

--quiet

Turn off Wget's output.


                            wget --quiet ...

--verbose

Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is verbose.


                            wget --verbose ...

--no-verbose

Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use -q for that), which means that error messages and basic information stillget printed.


                            wget --no-verbose ...

--report-speed

Output bandwidth as type. The only accepted value is bits.


                            wget --report-speed ...

--input-file

Read URLs from a local or external file. If - is specified as file, URLs are read from the standard input. (Use ./- to readfrom a file literally named -.)If this function is used, no URLs need be present on the command line. If there are URLs both on the command line and in aninput file, those on the command lines will be the first ones to be retrieved. If --force-html is not specified, then fileshould consist of a series of URLs, one per line.However, if you specify --force-html, the document will be regarded as html. In that case you may have problems with relativelinks, which you can solve either by adding "<base href="url">" to the documents or by specifying --base=url on the command line.If the file is an external one, the document will be automatically treated as html if the Content-Type matches text/html.Furthermore, the file's location will be implicitly used as base href if none was specified.


                            wget --input-file ...

--input-metalink

Downloads files covered in local Metalink file. Metalink version 3 and 4 are supported.


                            wget --input-metalink ...

--keep-badhash

Keeps downloaded Metalink's files with a bad hash. It appends .badhash to the name of Metalink's files which have a checksummismatch, except without overwriting existing files.


                            wget --keep-badhash ...

--metalink-over-http

Issues HTTP HEAD request instead of GET and extracts Metalink metadata from response headers. Then it switches to Metalinkdownload. If no valid Metalink metadata is found, it falls back to ordinary HTTP download. Enables Content-Type:application/metalink4+xml files download/processing.


                            wget --metalink-over-http ...

--metalink-index

Set the Metalink application/metalink4+xml metaurl ordinal NUMBER. From 1 to the total number of "application/metalink4+xml"available. Specify 0 or inf to choose the first good one. Metaurls, such as those from a --metalink-over-http, may have beensorted by priority key's value; keep this in mind to choose the right NUMBER.


                            wget --metalink-index ...

--preferred-location

Set preferred location for Metalink resources. This has effect if multiple resources with same priority are available.


                            wget --preferred-location ...

--xattr

Enable use of file system's extended attributes to save the original URL and the Referer HTTP header value if used.Be aware that the URL might contain private information like access tokens or credentials.


                            wget --xattr ...

--force-html

When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as an HTML file. This enables you to retrieve relative links fromexisting HTML files on your local disk, by adding "<base href="url">" to HTML, or using the --base command-line option.


                            wget --force-html ...

--base

Resolves relative links using URL as the point of reference, when reading links from an HTML file specified via the


                            wget --base ...

--config

Specify the location of a startup file you wish to use instead of the default one(s). Use --no-config to disable reading ofconfig files. If both --config and --no-config are given, --no-config is ignored.


                            wget --config ...

--rejected-log

Logs all URL rejections to logfile as comma separated values. The values include the reason of rejection, the URL and the parentURL it was found in.Download Options


                            wget --rejected-log ...

--bind-address

When making client TCP/IP connections, bind to ADDRESS on the local machine. ADDRESS may be specified as a hostname or IPaddress. This option can be useful if your machine is bound to multiple IPs.


                            wget --bind-address ...

--bind-dns-address

[libcares only] This address overrides the route for DNS requests. If you ever need to circumvent the standard settings from/etc/resolv.conf, this option together with --dns-servers is your friend. ADDRESS must be specified either as IPv4 or IPv6address. Wget needs to be built with libcares for this option to be available.


                            wget --bind-dns-address ...

--dns-servers

[libcares only] The given address(es) override the standard nameserver addresses, e.g. as configured in /etc/resolv.conf.ADDRESSES may be specified either as IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, comma-separated. Wget needs to be built with libcares for thisoption to be available.


                            wget --dns-servers ...

--tries

Set number of tries to number. Specify 0 or inf for infinite retrying. The default is to retry 20 times, with the exception offatal errors like "connection refused" or "not found" (404), which are not retried.


                            wget --tries ...

--output-document

The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be concatenated together and written to file. If - isused as file, documents will be printed to standard output, disabling link conversion. (Use ./- to print to a file literallynamed -.)Use of -O is not intended to mean simply "use the name file instead of the one in the URL;" rather, it is analogous to shellredirection: wget -O file http://foo is intended to work like wget -O - http://foo > file; file will be truncated immediately,and all downloaded content will be written there.For this reason, -N (for timestamp-checking) is not supported in combination with -O: since file is always newly created, it willalways have a very new timestamp. A warning will be issued if this combination is used.Similarly, using -r or -p with -O may not work as you expect: Wget won't just download the first file to file and then downloadthe rest to their normal names: all downloaded content will be placed in file. This was disabled in version 1.11, but has beenreinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are some cases where this behavior can actually have some use.A combination with -nc is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.Note that a combination with -k is only permitted when downloading a single document, as in that case it will just convert allrelative URIs to external ones; -k makes no sense for multiple URIs when they're all being downloaded to a single file; -k can beused only when the output is a regular file.


                            wget --output-document ...

--no-clobber

If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory, Wget's behavior depends on a few options, including -nc. Incertain cases, the local file will be clobbered, or overwritten, upon repeated download. In other cases it will be preserved.When running Wget without -N, -nc, -r, or -p, downloading the same file in the same directory will result in the original copy offile being preserved and the second copy being named file.1. If that file is downloaded yet again, the third copy will be namedfile.2, and so on. (This is also the behavior with -nd, even if -r or -p are in effect.) When -nc is specified, this behavioris suppressed, and Wget will refuse to download newer copies of file. Therefore, ""no-clobber"" is actually a misnomer in thismode---it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the numeric suffixes were already preventing clobbering), but rather the multipleversion saving that's prevented.When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N, -nd, or -nc, re-downloading a file will result in the new copy simplyoverwriting the old. Adding -nc will prevent this behavior, instead causing the original version to be preserved and any newercopies on the server to be ignored.When running Wget with -N, with or without -r or -p, the decision as to whether or not to download a newer copy of a file dependson the local and remote timestamp and size of the file. -nc may not be specified at the same time as -N.A combination with -O/--output-document is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html or .htm will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as if theyhad been retrieved from the Web.


                            wget --no-clobber ...

--backups

Before (over)writing a file, back up an existing file by adding a .1 suffix (_1 on VMS) to the file name. Such backup files arerotated to .2, .3, and so on, up to backups (and lost beyond that).


                            wget --backups ...

--no-netrc

Do not try to obtain credentials from .netrc file. By default .netrc file is searched for credentials in case none have beenpassed on command line and authentication is required.


                            wget --no-netrc ...

--continue

Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This is useful when you want to finish up a download started by a previousinstance of Wget, or by another program. For instance:wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.ZIf there is a file named ls-lR.Z in the current directory, Wget will assume that it is the first portion of the remote file, andwill ask the server to continue the retrieval from an offset equal to the length of the local file.Note that you don't need to specify this option if you just want the current invocation of Wget to retry downloading a fileshould the connection be lost midway through. This is the default behavior. -c only affects resumption of downloads startedprior to this invocation of Wget, and whose local files are still sitting around.Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote file to ls-lR.Z.1, leaving the truncated ls-lR.Z file alone.If you use -c on a non-empty file, and the server does not support continued downloading, Wget will restart the download fromscratch and overwrite the existing file entirely.Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a file which is of equal size as the one on the server, Wget will refuse to downloadthe file and print an explanatory message. The same happens when the file is smaller on the server than locally (presumablybecause it was changed on the server since your last download attempt)---because "continuing" is not meaningful, no downloadoccurs.On the other side of the coin, while using -c, any file that's bigger on the server than locally will be considered an incompletedownload and only "(length(remote) - length(local))" bytes will be downloaded and tacked onto the end of the local file. Thisbehavior can be desirable in certain cases---for instance, you can use wget -c to download just the new portion that's beenappended to a data collection or log file.However, if the file is bigger on the server because it's been changed, as opposed to just appended to, you'll end up with agarbled file. Wget has no way of verifying that the local file is really a valid prefix of the remote file. You need to beespecially careful of this when using -c in conjunction with -r, since every file will be considered as an "incomplete download"candidate.Another instance where you'll get a garbled file if you try to use -c is if you have a lame HTTP proxy that inserts a "transferinterrupted" string into the local file. In the future a "rollback" option may be added to deal with this case.Note that -c only works with FTP servers and with HTTP servers that support the "Range" header.


                            wget --continue ...

--start-pos

Start downloading at zero-based position OFFSET. Offset may be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the `k' suffix, or megabyteswith the `m' suffix, etc.


                            wget --start-pos ...

--progress

Select the type of the progress indicator you wish to use. Legal indicators are "dot" and "bar".The "bar" indicator is used by default. It draws an ASCII progress bar graphics (a.k.a "thermometer" display) indicating thestatus of retrieval. If the output is not a TTY, the "dot" bar will be used by default.Use --progress=dot to switch to the "dot" display. It traces the retrieval by printing dots on the screen, each dot representinga fixed amount of downloaded data.The progress type can also take one or more parameters. The parameters vary based on the type selected. Parameters to type arepassed by appending them to the type sperated by a colon (:) like this: --progress=type:parameter1:parameter2.When using the dotted retrieval, you may set the style by specifying the type as dot:style. Different styles assign differentmeaning to one dot. With the "default" style each dot represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The"binary" style has a more "computer"-like orientation---8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384Klines). The "mega" style is suitable for downloading large files---each dot represents 64K retrieved, there are eight dots in acluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains 3M). If "mega" is not enough then you can use the "giga" style---eachdot represents 1M retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 32 dots on each line (so each line contains 32M).With --progress=bar, there are currently two possible parameters, force and noscroll.When the output is not a TTY, the progress bar always falls back to "dot", even if --progress=bar was passed to Wget duringinvocation. This behaviour can be overridden and the "bar" output forced by using the "force" parameter as --progress=bar:force.By default, the bar style progress bar scroll the name of the file from left to right for the file being downloaded if thefilename exceeds the maximum length allotted for its display. In certain cases, such as with --progress=bar:force, one may notwant the scrolling filename in the progress bar. By passing the "noscroll" parameter, Wget can be forced to display as much ofthe filename as possible without scrolling through it.Note that you can set the default style using the "progress" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the commandline. For example, to force the bar output without scrolling, use --progress=bar:force:noscroll.


                            wget --progress ...

--show-progress

Force wget to display the progress bar in any verbosity.By default, wget only displays the progress bar in verbose mode. One may however, want wget to display the progress bar onscreen in conjunction with any other verbosity modes like --no-verbose or --quiet. This is often a desired a property wheninvoking wget to download several small/large files. In such a case, wget could simply be invoked with this parameter to get amuch cleaner output on the screen.This option will also force the progress bar to be printed to stderr when used alongside the --logfile option.


                            wget --show-progress ...

--timestamping

Turn on time-stamping.


                            wget --timestamping ...

--no-if-modified-since

Do not send If-Modified-Since header in -N mode. Send preliminary HEAD request instead. This has only effect in -N mode.


                            wget --no-if-modified-since ...

--no-use-server-timestamps

Don't set the local file's timestamp by the one on the server.By default, when a file is downloaded, its timestamps are set to match those from the remote file. This allows the use of


                            wget --no-use-server-timestamps ...

--server-response

Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.


                            wget --server-response ...

--spider

When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web spider, which means that it will not download the pages, just check thatthey are there. For example, you can use Wget to check your bookmarks:wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.htmlThis feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the functionality of real web spiders.


                            wget --spider ...

--timeout

Set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This is equivalent to specifying --dns-timeout, --connect-timeout, and


                            wget --timeout ...

--read-timeout,

When interacting with the network, Wget can check for timeout and abort the operation if it takes too long. This preventsanomalies like hanging reads and infinite connects. The only timeout enabled by default is a 900-second read timeout. Setting atimeout to 0 disables it altogether. Unless you know what you are doing, it is best not to change the default timeout settings.All timeout-related options accept decimal values, as well as subsecond values. For example, 0.1 seconds is a legal (thoughunwise) choice of timeout. Subsecond timeouts are useful for checking server response times or for testing network latency.


                            wget --read-timeout, ...

--dns-timeout

Set the DNS lookup timeout to seconds seconds. DNS lookups that don't complete within the specified time will fail. By default,there is no timeout on DNS lookups, other than that implemented by system libraries.


                            wget --dns-timeout ...

--connect-timeout

Set the connect timeout to seconds seconds. TCP connections that take longer to establish will be aborted. By default, there isno connect timeout, other than that implemented by system libraries.


                            wget --connect-timeout ...

--read-timeout

Set the read (and write) timeout to seconds seconds. The "time" of this timeout refers to idle time: if, at any point in thedownload, no data is received for more than the specified number of seconds, reading fails and the download is restarted. Thisoption does not directly affect the duration of the entire download.Of course, the remote server may choose to terminate the connection sooner than this option requires. The default read timeoutis 900 seconds.


                            wget --read-timeout ...

--limit-rate

Limit the download speed to amount bytes per second. Amount may be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the k suffix, or megabyteswith the m suffix. For example, --limit-rate=20k will limit the retrieval rate to 20KB/s. This is useful when, for whateverreason, you don't want Wget to consume the entire available bandwidth.This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunction with power suffixes; for example, --limit-rate=2.5k is alegal value.Note that Wget implements the limiting by sleeping the appropriate amount of time after a network read that took less time thanspecified by the rate. Eventually this strategy causes the TCP transfer to slow down to approximately the specified rate.However, it may take some time for this balance to be achieved, so don't be surprised if limiting the rate doesn't work well withvery small files.


                            wget --limit-rate ...

--wait

Wait the specified number of seconds between the retrievals. Use of this option is recommended, as it lightens the server loadby making the requests less frequent. Instead of in seconds, the time can be specified in minutes using the "m" suffix, in hoursusing "h" suffix, or in days using "d" suffix.Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network or the destination host is down, so that Wget can wait longenough to reasonably expect the network error to be fixed before the retry. The waiting interval specified by this function isinfluenced by "--random-wait", which see.


                            wget --wait ...

--waitretry

If you don't want Wget to wait between every retrieval, but only between retries of failed downloads, you can use this option.Wget will use linear backoff, waiting 1 second after the first failure on a given file, then waiting 2 seconds after the secondfailure on that file, up to the maximum number of seconds you specify.By default, Wget will assume a value of 10 seconds.


                            wget --waitretry ...

--random-wait

Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs such as Wget by looking for statistically significantsimilarities in the time between requests. This option causes the time between requests to vary between 0.5 and 1.5 * waitseconds, where wait was specified using the --wait option, in order to mask Wget's presence from such analysis.A 2001 article in a publication devoted to development on a popular consumer platform provided code to perform this analysis onthe fly. Its author suggested blocking at the class C address level to ensure automated retrieval programs were blocked despitechanging DHCP-supplied addresses.The --random-wait option was inspired by this ill-advised recommendation to block many unrelated users from a web site due to theactions of one.


                            wget --random-wait ...

--no-proxy

Don't use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy environment variable is defined.


                            wget --no-proxy ...

--quota

Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), ormegabytes (with m suffix).Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if you specify wget -Q10k https://example.com/ls-lR.gz, all ofthe ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota isrespected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download willbe aborted when the quota is exceeded.Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.


                            wget --quota ...

--no-dns-cache

Turn off caching of DNS lookups. Normally, Wget remembers the IP addresses it looked up from DNS so it doesn't have torepeatedly contact the DNS server for the same (typically small) set of hosts it retrieves from. This cache exists in memoryonly; a new Wget run will contact DNS again.However, it has been reported that in some situations it is not desirable to cache host names, even for the duration of a short-running application like Wget. With this option Wget issues a new DNS lookup (more precisely, a new call to "gethostbyname" or"getaddrinfo") each time it makes a new connection. Please note that this option will not affect caching that might be performedby the resolving library or by an external caching layer, such as NSCD.If you don't understand exactly what this option does, you probably won't need it.


                            wget --no-dns-cache ...

--restrict-file-names

Change which characters found in remote URLs must be escaped during generation of local filenames. Characters that arerestricted by this option are escaped, i.e. replaced with %HH, where HH is the hexadecimal number that corresponds to therestricted character. This option may also be used to force all alphabetical cases to be either lower- or uppercase.By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part of file names on your operating system, as well ascontrol characters that are typically unprintable. This option is useful for changing these defaults, perhaps because you aredownloading to a non-native partition, or because you want to disable escaping of the control characters, or you want to furtherrestrict characters to only those in the ASCII range of values.The modes are a comma-separated set of text values. The acceptable values are unix, windows, nocontrol, ascii, lowercase, anduppercase. The values unix and windows are mutually exclusive (one will override the other), as are lowercase and uppercase.Those last are special cases, as they do not change the set of characters that would be escaped, but rather force local filepaths to be converted either to lower- or uppercase.When "unix" is specified, Wget escapes the character / and the control characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159. This is thedefault on Unix-like operating systems.When "windows" is given, Wget escapes the characters \, |, /, :, ?, ", *, <, >, and the control characters in the ranges 0--31and 128--159. In addition to this, Wget in Windows mode uses + instead of : to separate host and port in local file names, anduses @ instead of ? to separate the query portion of the file name from the rest. Therefore, a URL that would be saved aswww.xemacs.org:4300/search.pl?input=blah in Unix mode would be saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=blah in Windows mode.This mode is the default on Windows.If you specify nocontrol, then the escaping of the control characters is also switched off. This option may make sense when youare downloading URLs whose names contain UTF-8 characters, on a system which can save and display filenames in UTF-8 (somepossible byte values used in UTF-8 byte sequences fall in the range of values designated by Wget as "controls").The ascii mode is used to specify that any bytes whose values are outside the range of ASCII characters (that is, greater than127) shall be escaped. This can be useful when saving filenames whose encoding does not match the one used locally.


                            wget --restrict-file-names ...

--inet6-only

Force connecting to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. With --inet4-only or -4, Wget will only connect to IPv4 hosts, ignoring AAAA recordsin DNS, and refusing to connect to IPv6 addresses specified in URLs. Conversely, with --inet6-only or -6, Wget will only connectto IPv6 hosts and ignore A records and IPv4 addresses.Neither options should be needed normally. By default, an IPv6-aware Wget will use the address family specified by the host'sDNS record. If the DNS responds with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, Wget will try them in sequence until it finds one it canconnect to. (Also see "--prefer-family" option described below.)These options can be used to deliberately force the use of IPv4 or IPv6 address families on dual family systems, usually to aiddebugging or to deal with broken network configuration. Only one of --inet6-only and --inet4-only may be specified at the sametime. Neither option is available in Wget compiled without IPv6 support.


                            wget --inet6-only ...

--prefer-family

When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the addresses with specified address family first. The address orderreturned by DNS is used without change by default.This avoids spurious errors and connect attempts when accessing hosts that resolve to both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses from IPv4networks. For example, www.kame.net resolves to 2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085 and to 203.178.141.194. When the preferredfamily is "IPv4", the IPv4 address is used first; when the preferred family is "IPv6", the IPv6 address is used first; if thespecified value is "none", the address order returned by DNS is used without change.Unlike -4 and -6, this option doesn't inhibit access to any address family, it only changes the order in which the addresses areaccessed. Also note that the reordering performed by this option is stable---it doesn't affect order of addresses of the samefamily. That is, the relative order of all IPv4 addresses and of all IPv6 addresses remains intact in all cases.


                            wget --prefer-family ...

--retry-connrefused

Consider "connection refused" a transient error and try again. Normally Wget gives up on a URL when it is unable to connect tothe site because failure to connect is taken as a sign that the server is not running at all and that retries would not help.This option is for mirroring unreliable sites whose servers tend to disappear for short periods of time.


                            wget --retry-connrefused ...

--password

Specify the username user and password password for both FTP and HTTP file retrieval. These parameters can be overridden usingthe --ftp-user and --ftp-password options for FTP connections and the --http-user and --http-password options for HTTPconnections.


                            wget --password ...

--ask-password

Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be specified when --password is being used, because they aremutually exclusive.


                            wget --ask-password ...

--use-askpass

Prompt for a user and password using the specified command. If no command is specified then the command in the environmentvariable WGET_ASKPASS is used. If WGET_ASKPASS is not set then the command in the environment variable SSH_ASKPASS is used.You can set the default command for use-askpass in the .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command line.


                            wget --use-askpass ...

--no-iri

Turn off internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use --iri to turn it on. IRI support is activated by default.You can set the default state of IRI support using the "iri" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the commandline.


                            wget --no-iri ...

--local-encoding

Force Wget to use encoding as the default system encoding. That affects how Wget converts URLs specified as arguments from localeto UTF-8 for IRI support.Wget use the function "nl_langinfo()" and then the "CHARSET" environment variable to get the locale. If it fails, ASCII is used.You can set the default local encoding using the "local_encoding" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from thecommand line.


                            wget --local-encoding ...

--remote-encoding

Force Wget to use encoding as the default remote server encoding. That affects how Wget converts URIs found in files from remoteencoding to UTF-8 during a recursive fetch. This options is only useful for IRI support, for the interpretation of non-ASCIIcharacters.For HTTP, remote encoding can be found in HTTP "Content-Type" header and in HTML "Content-Type http-equiv" meta tag.You can set the default encoding using the "remoteencoding" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the commandline.


                            wget --remote-encoding ...

--unlink

Force Wget to unlink file instead of clobbering existing file. This option is useful for downloading to the directory withhardlinks.Directory Options


                            wget --unlink ...

--no-directories

Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get saved tothe current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up more than once, the filenames will get extensions .n).


                            wget --no-directories ...

--force-directories

The opposite of -nd---create a hierarchy of directories, even if one would not have been created otherwise. E.g. wget -xhttp://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt will save the downloaded file to fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt.


                            wget --force-directories ...

--no-host-directories

Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking Wget with -r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ will create astructure of directories beginning with fly.srk.fer.hr/. This option disables such behavior.


                            wget --no-host-directories ...

--protocol-directories

Use the protocol name as a directory component of local file names. For example, with this option, wget -r http://host will saveto http/host/... rather than just to host/....


                            wget --protocol-directories ...

--cut-dirs

Ignore number directory components. This is useful for getting a fine-grained control over the directory where recursiveretrieval will be saved.Take, for example, the directory at ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. If you retrieve it with -r, it will be saved locally underftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. While the -nH option can remove the ftp.xemacs.org/ part, you are still stuck with pub/xemacs. Thisis where --cut-dirs comes in handy; it makes Wget not "see" number remote directory components. Here are several examples of how


                            wget --cut-dirs ...

-nH

--cut-dirs=1 -> xemacs/


                            wget -nH ...

--cut-dirs=1

...If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is similar to a combination of -nd and -P. However, unlike


                            wget --cut-dirs=1 ...

-nd

xemacs/beta, as one would expect.


                            wget -nd ...

--directory-prefix

Set directory prefix to prefix. The directory prefix is the directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved to,i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is . (the current directory).HTTP Options


                            wget --directory-prefix ...

--default-page

Use name as the default file name when it isn't known (i.e., for URLs that end in a slash), instead of index.html.


                            wget --default-page ...

--adjust-extension

If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html is downloaded and the URL does not end with the regexp \.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?,this option will cause the suffix .html to be appended to the local filename. This is useful, for instance, when you'remirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages, but you want the mirrored pages to be viewable on your stock Apache server.Another good use for this is when you're downloading CGI-generated materials. A URL like http://site.com/article.cgi?25 will besaved as article.cgi?25.html.Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded every time you re-mirror a site, because Wget can't tell that thelocal X.html file corresponds to remote URL X (since it doesn't yet know that the URL produces output of type text/html orapplication/xhtml+xml.As of version 1.12, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded files of type text/css end in the suffix .css, and the option wasrenamed from --html-extension, to better reflect its new behavior. The old option name is still acceptable, but should now beconsidered deprecated.As of version 1.19.2, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded files with a "Content-Encoding" of br, compress, deflate or gzipend in the suffix .br, .Z, .zlib and .gz respectively.At some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to include suffixes for other types of content, including contenttypes that are not parsed by Wget.


                            wget --adjust-extension ...

--http-password

Specify the username user and password password on an HTTP server. According to the type of the challenge, Wget will encode themusing either the "basic" (insecure), the "digest", or the Windows "NTLM" authentication scheme.Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either method reveals your password to anyone who bothers torun "ps". To prevent the passwords from being seen, use the --use-askpass or store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure toprotect those files from other users with "chmod". If the passwords are really important, do not leave them lying in those fileseither---edit the files and delete them after Wget has started the download.


                            wget --http-password ...

--no-http-keep-alive

Turn off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP downloads. Normally, Wget asks the server to keep the connection open so that, whenyou download more than one document from the same server, they get transferred over the same TCP connection. This saves time andat the same time reduces the load on the server.This option is useful when, for some reason, persistent (keep-alive) connections don't work for you, for example due to a serverbug or due to the inability of server-side scripts to cope with the connections.


                            wget --no-http-keep-alive ...

--no-cache

Disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send the remote server an appropriate directive (Pragma: no-cache) to get thefile from the remote service, rather than returning the cached version. This is especially useful for retrieving and flushingout-of-date documents on proxy servers.Caching is allowed by default.


                            wget --no-cache ...

--no-cookies

Disable the use of cookies. Cookies are a mechanism for maintaining server-side state. The server sends the client a cookieusing the "Set-Cookie" header, and the client responds with the same cookie upon further requests. Since cookies allow theserver owners to keep track of visitors and for sites to exchange this information, some consider them a breach of privacy. Thedefault is to use cookies; however, storing cookies is not on by default.


                            wget --no-cookies ...

--load-cookies

Load cookies from file before the first HTTP retrieval. file is a textual file in the format originally used by Netscape'scookies.txt file.You will typically use this option when mirroring sites that require that you be logged in to access some or all of theircontent. The login process typically works by the web server issuing an HTTP cookie upon receiving and verifying yourcredentials. The cookie is then resent by the browser when accessing that part of the site, and so proves your identity.Mirroring such a site requires Wget to send the same cookies your browser sends when communicating with the site. This isachieved by --load-cookies---simply point Wget to the location of the cookies.txt file, and it will send the same cookies yourbrowser would send in the same situation. Different browsers keep textual cookie files in different locations:"Netscape 4.x."The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt."Mozilla and Netscape 6.x."Mozilla's cookie file is also named cookies.txt, located somewhere under ~/.mozilla, in the directory of your profile. Thefull path usually ends up looking somewhat like ~/.mozilla/default/some-weird-string/cookies.txt."Internet Explorer."You can produce a cookie file Wget can use by using the File menu, Import and Export, Export Cookies. This has been testedwith Internet Explorer 5; it is not guaranteed to work with earlier versions."Other browsers."If you are using a different browser to create your cookies, --load-cookies will only work if you can locate or produce acookie file in the Netscape format that Wget expects.If you cannot use --load-cookies, there might still be an alternative. If your browser supports a "cookie manager", you can useit to view the cookies used when accessing the site you're mirroring. Write down the name and value of the cookie, and manuallyinstruct Wget to send those cookies, bypassing the "official" cookie support:wget --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"


                            wget --load-cookies ...

--save-cookies

Save cookies to file before exiting. This will not save cookies that have expired or that have no expiry time (so-called"session cookies"), but also see --keep-session-cookies.


                            wget --save-cookies ...

--keep-session-cookies

When specified, causes --save-cookies to also save session cookies. Session cookies are normally not saved because they aremeant to be kept in memory and forgotten when you exit the browser. Saving them is useful on sites that require you to log in orto visit the home page before you can access some pages. With this option, multiple Wget runs are considered a single browsersession as far as the site is concerned.Since the cookie file format does not normally carry session cookies, Wget marks them with an expiry timestamp of 0. Wget's


                            wget --keep-session-cookies ...

--ignore-length

Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more precise) send out bogus "Content-Length" headers, which makes Wget gowild, as it thinks not all the document was retrieved. You can spot this syndrome if Wget retries getting the same documentagain and again, each time claiming that the (otherwise normal) connection has closed on the very same byte.With this option, Wget will ignore the "Content-Length" header---as if it never existed.


                            wget --ignore-length ...

--header

Send header-line along with the rest of the headers in each HTTP request. The supplied header is sent as-is, which means it mustcontain name and value separated by colon, and must not contain newlines.You may define more than one additional header by specifying --header more than once.wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \


                            wget --header ...

--header='Accept-Language:

http://fly.srk.fer.hr/Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all previous user-defined headers.As of Wget 1.10, this option can be used to override headers otherwise generated automatically. This example instructs Wget toconnect to localhost, but to specify foo.bar in the "Host" header:wget --header="Host: foo.bar" http://localhost/In versions of Wget prior to 1.10 such use of --header caused sending of duplicate headers.


                            wget --header='Accept-Language: ...

--compression

Choose the type of compression to be used. Legal values are auto, gzip and none.If auto or gzip are specified, Wget asks the server to compress the file using the gzip compression format. If the servercompresses the file and responds with the "Content-Encoding" header field set appropriately, the file will be decompressedautomatically.If none is specified, wget will not ask the server to compress the file and will not decompress any server responses. This is thedefault.Compression support is currently experimental. In case it is turned on, please report any bugs to "bug-wget@gnu.org".


                            wget --compression ...

--max-redirect

Specifies the maximum number of redirections to follow for a resource. The default is 20, which is usually far more thannecessary. However, on those occasions where you want to allow more (or fewer), this is the option to use.


                            wget --max-redirect ...

--proxy-password

Specify the username user and password password for authentication on a proxy server. Wget will encode them using the "basic"authentication scheme.Security considerations similar to those with --http-password pertain here as well.


                            wget --proxy-password ...

--referer

Include `Referer: url' header in HTTP request. Useful for retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume they arealways being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only come out properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that pointto them.


                            wget --referer ...

--save-headers

Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding the actual contents, with an empty line as the separator.


                            wget --save-headers ...

--user-agent

Identify as agent-string to the HTTP server.The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a "User-Agent" header field. This enables distinguishing theWWW software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of protocol violations. Wget normally identifies as Wget/version,version being the current version number of Wget.However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of tailoring the output according to the "User-Agent"-suppliedinformation. While this is not such a bad idea in theory, it has been abused by servers denying information to clients otherthan (historically) Netscape or, more frequently, Microsoft Internet Explorer. This option allows you to change the "User-Agent"line issued by Wget. Use of this option is discouraged, unless you really know what you are doing.Specifying empty user agent with --user-agent="" instructs Wget not to send the "User-Agent" header in HTTP requests.


                            wget --user-agent ...

--post-file

Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send the specified data in the request body. --post-data sends string as data,whereas --post-file sends the contents of file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way. In particular, they bothexpect content of the form "key1=value1&key2=value2", with percent-encoding for special characters; the only difference is thatone expects its content as a command-line parameter and the other accepts its content from a file. In particular, --post-file isnot for transmitting files as form attachments: those must appear as "key=value" data (with appropriate percent-coding) just likeeverything else. Wget does not currently support "multipart/form-data" for transmitting POST data; only"application/x-www-form-urlencoded". Only one of --post-data and --post-file should be specified.Please note that wget does not require the content to be of the form "key1=value1&key2=value2", and neither does it test for it.Wget will simply transmit whatever data is provided to it. Most servers however expect the POST data to be in the above formatwhen processing HTML Forms.When sending a POST request using the --post-file option, Wget treats the file as a binary file and will send every character inthe POST request without stripping trailing newline or formfeed characters. Any other control characters in the text will also besent as-is in the POST request.Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data in advance. Therefore the argument to "--post-file" must be aregular file; specifying a FIFO or something like /dev/stdin won't work. It's not quite clear how to work around this limitationinherent in HTTP/1.0. Although HTTP/1.1 introduces chunked transfer that doesn't require knowing the request length in advance,a client can't use chunked unless it knows it's talking to an HTTP/1.1 server. And it can't know that until it receives aresponse, which in turn requires the request to have been completed -- a chicken-and-egg problem.Note: As of version 1.15 if Wget is redirected after the POST request is completed, its behaviour will depend on the responsecode returned by the server. In case of a 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Moved Temporarily or 307 Temporary Redirect, Wget will, inaccordance with RFC2616, continue to send a POST request. In case a server wants the client to change the Request method uponredirection, it should send a 303 See Other response code.This example shows how to log in to a server using POST and then proceed to download the desired pages, presumably onlyaccessible to authorized users:# Log in to the server. This can be done only once.wget --save-cookies cookies.txt \


                            wget --post-file ...

--post-data

http://example.com/auth.php# Now grab the page or pages we care about.wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \


                            wget --post-data ...

-p

If the server is using session cookies to track user authentication, the above will not work because --save-cookies will not savethem (and neither will browsers) and the cookies.txt file will be empty. In that case use --keep-session-cookies along with


                            wget -p ...

--method

For the purpose of RESTful scripting, Wget allows sending of other HTTP Methods without the need to explicitly set them using


                            wget --method ...

--body-file

Must be set when additional data needs to be sent to the server along with the Method specified using --method. --body-datasends string as data, whereas --body-file sends the contents of file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way.Currently, --body-file is not for transmitting files as a whole. Wget does not currently support "multipart/form-data" fortransmitting data; only "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". In the future, this may be changed so that wget sends the


                            wget --body-file ...

--content-disposition

If this is set to on, experimental (not fully-functional) support for "Content-Disposition" headers is enabled. This cancurrently result in extra round-trips to the server for a "HEAD" request, and is known to suffer from a few bugs, which is why itis not currently enabled by default.This option is useful for some file-downloading CGI programs that use "Content-Disposition" headers to describe what the name ofa downloaded file should be.When combined with --metalink-over-http and --trust-server-names, a Content-Type: application/metalink4+xml file is named usingthe "Content-Disposition" filename field, if available.


                            wget --content-disposition ...

--content-on-error

If this is set to on, wget will not skip the content when the server responds with a http status code that indicates error.


                            wget --content-on-error ...

--trust-server-names

If this is set, on a redirect, the local file name will be based on the redirection URL. By default the local file name is basedon the original URL. When doing recursive retrieving this can be helpful because in many web sites redirected URLs correspond toan underlying file structure, while link URLs do not.


                            wget --trust-server-names ...

--auth-no-challenge

If this option is given, Wget will send Basic HTTP authentication information (plaintext username and password) for all requests,just like Wget 1.10.2 and prior did by default.Use of this option is not recommended, and is intended only to support some few obscure servers, which never send HTTPauthentication challenges, but accept unsolicited auth info, say, in addition to form-based authentication.


                            wget --auth-no-challenge ...

--retry-on-http-error

Consider given HTTP response codes as non-fatal, transient errors. Supply a comma-separated list of 3-digit HTTP response codesas argument. Useful to work around special circumstances where retries are required, but the server responds with an error codenormally not retried by Wget. Such errors might be 503 (Service Unavailable) and 429 (Too Many Requests). Retries enabled by thisoption are performed subject to the normal retry timing and retry count limitations of Wget.Using this option is intended to support special use cases only and is generally not recommended, as it can force retries even incases where the server is actually trying to decrease its load. Please use wisely and only if you know what you are doing.HTTPS (SSL/TLS) OptionsTo support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, Wget must be compiled with an external SSL library. The current default is GnuTLS. Inaddition, Wget also supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). If Wget is compiled without SSL support, none of these optionsare available.


                            wget --retry-on-http-error ...

--secure-protocol

Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are auto, SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1, TLSv1_2 and PFS. If auto is used,the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the appropriate protocol automatically, which is achieved by sending a TLSv1greeting. This is the default.Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1 or TLSv1_2 forces the use of the corresponding protocol. This is useful when talking toold and buggy SSL server implementations that make it hard for the underlying SSL library to choose the correct protocol version.Fortunately, such servers are quite rare.Specifying PFS enforces the use of the so-called Perfect Forward Security cipher suites. In short, PFS adds security by creatinga one-time key for each SSL connection. It has a bit more CPU impact on client and server. We use known to be secure ciphers(e.g. no MD4) and the TLS protocol.


                            wget --secure-protocol ...

--https-only

When in recursive mode, only HTTPS links are followed.


                            wget --https-only ...

--no-check-certificate

Don't check the server certificate against the available certificate authorities. Also don't require the URL host name to matchthe common name presented by the certificate.As of Wget 1.10, the default is to verify the server's certificate against the recognized certificate authorities, breaking theSSL handshake and aborting the download if the verification fails. Although this provides more secure downloads, it does breakinteroperability with some sites that worked with previous Wget versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, orotherwise invalid certificates. This option forces an "insecure" mode of operation that turns the certificate verificationerrors into warnings and allows you to proceed.If you encounter "certificate verification" errors or ones saying that "common name doesn't match requested host name", you canuse this option to bypass the verification and proceed with the download. Only use this option if you are otherwise convinced ofthe site's authenticity, or if you really don't care about the validity of its certificate. It is almost always a bad idea notto check the certificates when transmitting confidential or important data. For self-signed/internal certificates, you shoulddownload the certificate and verify against that instead of forcing this insecure mode. If you are really sure of not desiringany certificate verification, you can specify --check-certificate=quiet to tell wget to not print any warning about invalidcertificates, albeit in most cases this is the wrong thing to do.


                            wget --no-check-certificate ...

--certificate

Use the client certificate stored in file. This is needed for servers that are configured to require certificates from theclients that connect to them. Normally a certificate is not required and this switch is optional.


                            wget --certificate ...

--certificate-type

Specify the type of the client certificate. Legal values are PEM (assumed by default) and DER, also known as ASN1.


                            wget --certificate-type ...

--private-key

Read the private key from file. This allows you to provide the private key in a file separate from the certificate.


                            wget --private-key ...

--private-key-type

Specify the type of the private key. Accepted values are PEM (the default) and DER.


                            wget --private-key-type ...

--ca-certificate

Use file as the file with the bundle of certificate authorities ("CA") to verify the peers. The certificates must be in PEMformat.Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.


                            wget --ca-certificate ...

--ca-directory

Specifies directory containing CA certificates in PEM format. Each file contains one CA certificate, and the file name is basedon a hash value derived from the certificate. This is achieved by processing a certificate directory with the "c_rehash" utilitysupplied with OpenSSL. Using --ca-directory is more efficient than --ca-certificate when many certificates are installed becauseit allows Wget to fetch certificates on demand.Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.


                            wget --ca-directory ...

--crl-file

Specifies a CRL file in file. This is needed for certificates that have been revocated by the CAs.


                            wget --crl-file ...

--pinnedpubkey

Tells wget to use the specified public key file (or hashes) to verify the peer. This can be a path to a file which contains asingle public key in PEM or DER format, or any number of base64 encoded sha256 hashes preceded by "sha256//" and separated by ";"When negotiating a TLS or SSL connection, the server sends a certificate indicating its identity. A public key is extracted fromthis certificate and if it does not exactly match the public key(s) provided to this option, wget will abort the connectionbefore sending or receiving any data.


                            wget --pinnedpubkey ...

--random-file

[OpenSSL and LibreSSL only] Use file as the source of random data for seeding the pseudo-random number generator on systemswithout /dev/urandom.On such systems the SSL library needs an external source of randomness to initialize. Randomness may be provided by EGD (see


                            wget --random-file ...

--egd-file

[OpenSSL only] Use file as the EGD socket. EGD stands for Entropy Gathering Daemon, a user-space program that collects data fromvarious unpredictable system sources and makes it available to other programs that might need it. Encryption software, such asthe SSL library, needs sources of non-repeating randomness to seed the random number generator used to produce cryptographicallystrong keys.OpenSSL allows the user to specify his own source of entropy using the "RAND_FILE" environment variable. If this variable isunset, or if the specified file does not produce enough randomness, OpenSSL will read random data from EGD socket specified usingthis option.If this option is not specified (and the equivalent startup command is not used), EGD is never contacted. EGD is not needed onmodern Unix systems that support /dev/urandom.


                            wget --egd-file ...

--no-hsts

Wget supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security, RFC 6797) by default. Use --no-hsts to make Wget act as a non-HSTS-compliantUA. As a consequence, Wget would ignore all the "Strict-Transport-Security" headers, and would not enforce any existing HSTSpolicy.


                            wget --no-hsts ...

--hsts-file

By default, Wget stores its HSTS database in ~/.wget-hsts. You can use --hsts-file to override this. Wget will use the suppliedfile as the HSTS database. Such file must conform to the correct HSTS database format used by Wget. If Wget cannot parse theprovided file, the behaviour is unspecified.The Wget's HSTS database is a plain text file. Each line contains an HSTS entry (ie. a site that has issued a"Strict-Transport-Security" header and that therefore has specified a concrete HSTS policy to be applied). Lines starting with adash ("#") are ignored by Wget. Please note that in spite of this convenient human-readability hand-hacking the HSTS database isgenerally not a good idea.An HSTS entry line consists of several fields separated by one or more whitespace:"<hostname> SP [<port>] SP <include subdomains> SP <created> SP <max-age>"The hostname and port fields indicate the hostname and port to which the given HSTS policy applies. The port field may be zero,and it will, in most of the cases. That means that the port number will not be taken into account when deciding whether such HSTSpolicy should be applied on a given request (only the hostname will be evaluated). When port is different to zero, both thetarget hostname and the port will be evaluated and the HSTS policy will only be applied if both of them match. This feature hasbeen included for testing/development purposes only. The Wget testsuite (in testenv/) creates HSTS databases with explicit portswith the purpose of ensuring Wget's correct behaviour. Applying HSTS policies to ports other than the default ones is discouragedby RFC 6797 (see Appendix B "Differences between HSTS Policy and Same-Origin Policy"). Thus, this functionality should not beused in production environments and port will typically be zero. The last three fields do what they are expected to. The fieldinclude_subdomains can either be 1 or 0 and it signals whether the subdomains of the target domain should be part of the givenHSTS policy as well. The created and max-age fields hold the timestamp values of when such entry was created (first seen by Wget)and the HSTS-defined value 'max-age', which states how long should that HSTS policy remain active, measured in seconds elapsedsince the timestamp stored in created. Once that time has passed, that HSTS policy will no longer be valid and will eventually beremoved from the database.If you supply your own HSTS database via --hsts-file, be aware that Wget may modify the provided file if any change occursbetween the HSTS policies requested by the remote servers and those in the file. When Wget exists, it effectively updates theHSTS database by rewriting the database file with the new entries.If the supplied file does not exist, Wget will create one. This file will contain the new HSTS entries. If no HSTS entries weregenerated (no "Strict-Transport-Security" headers were sent by any of the servers) then no file will be created, not even anempty one. This behaviour applies to the default database file (~/.wget-hsts) as well: it will not be created until some serverenforces an HSTS policy.Care is taken not to override possible changes made by other Wget processes at the same time over the HSTS database. Beforedumping the updated HSTS entries on the file, Wget will re-read it and merge the changes.Using a custom HSTS database and/or modifying an existing one is discouraged. For more information about the potential securitythreats arised from such practice, see section 14 "Security Considerations" of RFC 6797, specially section 14.9 "CreativeManipulation of HSTS Policy Store".


                            wget --hsts-file ...

--warc-file

Use file as the destination WARC file.


                            wget --warc-file ...

--warc-header

Use string into as the warcinfo record.


                            wget --warc-header ...

--warc-max-size

Set the maximum size of the WARC files to size.


                            wget --warc-max-size ...

--warc-cdx

Write CDX index files.


                            wget --warc-cdx ...

--warc-dedup

Do not store records listed in this CDX file.


                            wget --warc-dedup ...

--no-warc-compression

Do not compress WARC files with GZIP.


                            wget --no-warc-compression ...

--no-warc-digests

Do not calculate SHA1 digests.


                            wget --no-warc-digests ...

--no-warc-keep-log

Do not store the log file in a WARC record.


                            wget --no-warc-keep-log ...

--warc-tempdir

Specify the location for temporary files created by the WARC writer.FTP Options


                            wget --warc-tempdir ...

--ftp-password

Specify the username user and password password on an FTP server. Without this, or the corresponding startup option, thepassword defaults to -wget@, normally used for anonymous FTP.Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either method reveals your password to anyone who bothers torun "ps". To prevent the passwords from being seen, store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure to protect those files fromother users with "chmod". If the passwords are really important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit the filesand delete them after Wget has started the download.


                            wget --ftp-password ...

--no-remove-listing

Don't remove the temporary .listing files generated by FTP retrievals. Normally, these files contain the raw directory listingsreceived from FTP servers. Not removing them can be useful for debugging purposes, or when you want to be able to easily checkon the contents of remote server directories (e.g. to verify that a mirror you're running is complete).Note that even though Wget writes to a known filename for this file, this is not a security hole in the scenario of a user making.listing a symbolic link to /etc/passwd or something and asking "root" to run Wget in his or her directory. Depending on theoptions used, either Wget will refuse to write to .listing, making the globbing/recursion/time-stamping operation fail, or thesymbolic link will be deleted and replaced with the actual .listing file, or the listing will be written to a .listing.numberfile.Even though this situation isn't a problem, though, "root" should never run Wget in a non-trusted user's directory. A user coulddo something as simple as linking index.html to /etc/passwd and asking "root" to run Wget with -N or -r so the file will beoverwritten.


                            wget --no-remove-listing ...

--no-glob

Turn off FTP globbing. Globbing refers to the use of shell-like special characters (wildcards), like *, ?, [ and ] to retrievemore than one file from the same directory at once, like:wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/*.msgBy default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a globbing character. This option may be used to turn globbing on oroff permanently.You may have to quote the URL to protect it from being expanded by your shell. Globbing makes Wget look for a directory listing,which is system-specific. This is why it currently works only with Unix FTP servers (and the ones emulating Unix "ls" output).


                            wget --no-glob ...

--no-passive-ftp

Disable the use of the passive FTP transfer mode. Passive FTP mandates that the client connect to the server to establish thedata connection rather than the other way around.If the machine is connected to the Internet directly, both passive and active FTP should work equally well. Behind most firewalland NAT configurations passive FTP has a better chance of working. However, in some rare firewall configurations, active FTPactually works when passive FTP doesn't. If you suspect this to be the case, use this option, or set "passive_ftp=off" in yourinit file.


                            wget --no-passive-ftp ...

--preserve-permissions

Preserve remote file permissions instead of permissions set by umask.


                            wget --preserve-permissions ...

--retr-symlinks

By default, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a symbolic link is encountered, the symbolic link is traversed andthe pointed-to files are retrieved. Currently, Wget does not traverse symbolic links to directories to download themrecursively, though this feature may be added in the future.When --retr-symlinks=no is specified, the linked-to file is not downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic link is created on thelocal filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be retrieved unless this recursive retrieval would have encountered it separatelyand downloaded it anyway. This option poses a security risk where a malicious FTP Server may cause Wget to write to filesoutside of the intended directories through a specially crafted .LISTING file.Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was specified on the command-line, rather than because it wasrecursed to, this option has no effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this case.FTPS Options


                            wget --retr-symlinks ...

--ftps-implicit

This option tells Wget to use FTPS implicitly. Implicit FTPS consists of initializing SSL/TLS from the very beginning of thecontrol connection. This option does not send an "AUTH TLS" command: it assumes the server speaks FTPS and directly starts anSSL/TLS connection. If the attempt is successful, the session continues just like regular FTPS ("PBSZ" and "PROT" are sent,etc.). Implicit FTPS is no longer a requirement for FTPS implementations, and thus many servers may not support it. If


                            wget --ftps-implicit ...

--no-ftps-resume-ssl

Do not resume the SSL/TLS session in the data channel. When starting a data connection, Wget tries to resume the SSL/TLS sessionpreviously started in the control connection. SSL/TLS session resumption avoids performing an entirely new handshake by reusingthe SSL/TLS parameters of a previous session. Typically, the FTPS servers want it that way, so Wget does this by default. Underrare circumstances however, one might want to start an entirely new SSL/TLS session in every data connection. This is what


                            wget --no-ftps-resume-ssl ...

--ftps-clear-data-connection

All the data connections will be in plain text. Only the control connection will be under SSL/TLS. Wget will send a "PROT C"command to achieve this, which must be approved by the server.


                            wget --ftps-clear-data-connection ...

--ftps-fallback-to-ftp

Fall back to FTP if FTPS is not supported by the target server. For security reasons, this option is not asserted by default. Thedefault behaviour is to exit with an error. If a server does not successfully reply to the initial "AUTH TLS" command, or in thecase of implicit FTPS, if the initial SSL/TLS connection attempt is rejected, it is considered that such server does not supportFTPS.Recursive Retrieval Options


                            wget --ftps-fallback-to-ftp ...

--recursive

Turn on recursive retrieving. The default maximum depth is 5.


                            wget --recursive ...

--level

Specify recursion maximum depth level depth.


                            wget --level ...

--delete-after

This option tells Wget to delete every single file it downloads, after having done so. It is useful for pre-fetching popularpages through a proxy, e.g.:wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not create directories.Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine. It does not issue the DELE command to remote FTP sites, forinstance. Also note that when --delete-after is specified, --convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are simply not created inthe first place.


                            wget --delete-after ...

--convert-links

After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not onlythe visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to external content, such as embedded images, links to stylesheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:· The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will be changed to refer to the file they point to as a relative link.Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in doc.html will bemodified to point to ../bar/img.gif. This kind of transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of directories.· The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget will be changed to include host name and absolute path of thelocation they point to.Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif), then the link in doc.html will bemodified to point to http://hostname/bar/img.gif.Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was downloaded, the link will refer to its local name; if it wasnot downloaded, the link will refer to its full Internet address rather than presenting a broken link. The fact that the formerlinks are converted to relative links ensures that you can move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory.Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which links have been downloaded. Because of that, the work done by -kwill be performed at the end of all the downloads.


                            wget --convert-links ...

--convert-file-only

This option converts only the filename part of the URLs, leaving the rest of the URLs untouched. This filename part is sometimesreferred to as the "basename", although we avoid that term here in order not to cause confusion.It works particularly well in conjunction with --adjust-extension, although this coupling is not enforced. It proves useful topopulate Internet caches with files downloaded from different hosts.Example: if some link points to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz with --adjust-extension asserted and its local destination is intended tobe ./foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css, then the link would be converted to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css. Note that only the filename part hasbeen modified. The rest of the URL has been left untouched, including the net path ("//") which would otherwise be processed byWget and converted to the effective scheme (ie. "http://").


                            wget --convert-file-only ...

--backup-converted

When converting a file, back up the original version with a .orig suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.


                            wget --backup-converted ...

--mirror

Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns on recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth andkeeps FTP directory listings. It is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf --no-remove-listing.


                            wget --mirror ...

--page-requisites

This option causes Wget to download all the files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML page. This includes suchthings as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets.Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite documents that may be needed to display it properly are notdownloaded. Using -r together with -l can help, but since Wget does not ordinarily distinguish between external and inlineddocuments, one is generally left with "leaf documents" that are missing their requisites.For instance, say document 1.html contains an "<IMG>" tag referencing 1.gif and an "<A>" tag pointing to external document2.html. Say that 2.html is similar but that its image is 2.gif and it links to 3.html. Say this continues up to somearbitrarily high number.If one executes the command:wget -r -l 2 http://<site>/1.htmlthen 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, 2.gif, and 3.html will be downloaded. As you can see, 3.html is without its requisite 3.gif becauseWget is simply counting the number of hops (up to 2) away from 1.html in order to determine where to stop the recursion.However, with this command:wget -r -l 2 -p http://<site>/1.htmlall the above files and 3.html's requisite 3.gif will be downloaded. Similarly,wget -r -l 1 -p http://<site>/1.htmlwill cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif to be downloaded. One might think that:wget -r -l 0 -p http://<site>/1.htmlwould download just 1.html and 1.gif, but unfortunately this is not the case, because -l 0 is equivalent to -l inf---that is,infinite recursion. To download a single HTML page (or a handful of them, all specified on the command-line or in a -i URL inputfile) and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off -r and -l:wget -p http://<site>/1.htmlNote that Wget will behave as if -r had been specified, but only that single page and its requisites will be downloaded. Linksfrom that page to external documents will not be followed. Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even ifthey exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options inaddition to -p:wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that Wget's idea of an external document link is any URL specified in an "<A>" tag,an "<AREA>" tag, or a "<LINK>" tag other than "<LINK REL="stylesheet">".


                            wget --page-requisites ...

--strict-comments

Turn on strict parsing of HTML comments. The default is to terminate comments at the first occurrence of -->.According to specifications, HTML comments are expressed as SGML declarations. Declaration is special markup that begins with <!and ends with >, such as <!DOCTYPE ...>, that may contain comments between a pair of -- delimiters. HTML comments are "emptydeclarations", SGML declarations without any non-comment text. Therefore,  is a valid comment, and so is <!--one--


                            wget --strict-comments ...

--two-->,

On the other hand, most HTML writers don't perceive comments as anything other than text delimited with , which isnot quite the same. For example, something like  works as a valid comment as long as the number of dashes is amultiple of four (!). If not, the comment technically lasts until the next --, which may be at the other end of the document.Because of this, many popular browsers completely ignore the specification and implement what users have come to expect: commentsdelimited with .Until version 1.9, Wget interpreted comments strictly, which resulted in missing links in many web pages that displayed fine inbrowsers, but had the misfortune of containing non-compliant comments. Beginning with version 1.9, Wget has joined the ranks ofclients that implements "naive" comments, terminating each comment at the first occurrence of -->.If, for whatever reason, you want strict comment parsing, use this option to turn it on.Recursive Accept/Reject Options


                            wget --two-->, ...

-A

acclist --accept acclist


                            wget -A ...

-R

Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to accept or reject. Note that if any of the wildcard characters,*, ?, [ or ], appear in an element of acclist or rejlist, it will be treated as a pattern, rather than a suffix. In this case,you have to enclose the pattern into quotes to prevent your shell from expanding it, like in -A "*.mp3" or -A '*.mp3'.


                            wget -R ...

--reject-regex

Specify a regular expression to accept or reject the complete URL.


                            wget --reject-regex ...

--regex-type

Specify the regular expression type. Possible types are posix or pcre. Note that to be able to use pcre type, wget has to becompiled with libpcre support.


                            wget --regex-type ...

--domains

Set domains to be followed. domain-list is a comma-separated list of domains. Note that it does not turn on -H.


                            wget --domains ...

--exclude-domains

Specify the domains that are not to be followed.


                            wget --exclude-domains ...

--follow-ftp

Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, Wget will ignore all the FTP links.


                            wget --follow-ftp ...

--follow-tags

Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it considers when looking for linked documents during a recursiveretrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be considered, however, he or she should be specify such tags in acomma-separated list with this option.


                            wget --follow-tags ...

--ignore-tags

This is the opposite of the --follow-tags option. To skip certain HTML tags when recursively looking for documents to download,specify them in a comma-separated list.In the past, this option was the best bet for downloading a single page and its requisites, using a command-line like:wget --ignore-tags=a,area -H -k -K -r http://<site>/<document>However, the author of this option came across a page with tags like "<LINK REL="home" HREF="/">" and came to the realizationthat specifying tags to ignore was not enough. One can't just tell Wget to ignore "<LINK>", because then stylesheets will not bedownloaded. Now the best bet for downloading a single page and its requisites is the dedicated --page-requisites option.


                            wget --ignore-tags ...

--ignore-case

Ignore case when matching files and directories. This influences the behavior of -R, -A, -I, and -X options, as well as globbingimplemented when downloading from FTP sites. For example, with this option, -A "*.txt" will match file1.txt, but also file2.TXT,file3.TxT, and so on. The quotes in the example are to prevent the shell from expanding the pattern.


                            wget --ignore-case ...

--span-hosts

Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving.


                            wget --span-hosts ...

--relative

Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page without any distractions, not even those from the samehosts.


                            wget --relative ...

--include-directories

Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading. Elements of list may contain wildcards.


                            wget --include-directories ...

--exclude-directories

Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download. Elements of list may contain wildcards.


                            wget --exclude-directories ...

--no-parent

Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively. This is a useful option, since it guarantees that onlythe files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.ENVIRONMENTWget supports proxies for both HTTP and FTP retrievals. The standard way to specify proxy location, which Wget recognizes, is usingthe following environment variables:http_proxyhttps_proxyIf set, the http_proxy and https_proxy variables should contain the URLs of the proxies for HTTP and HTTPS connectionsrespectively.ftp_proxyThis variable should contain the URL of the proxy for FTP connections. It is quite common that http_proxy and ftp_proxy are setto the same URL.no_proxyThis variable should contain a comma-separated list of domain extensions proxy should not be used for. For instance, if thevalue of no_proxy is .mit.edu, proxy will not be used to retrieve documents from MIT.EXIT STATUSWget may return one of several error codes if it encounters problems.0 No problems occurred.1 Generic error code.2 Parse error---for instance, when parsing command-line options, the .wgetrc or .netrc...3 File I/O error.4 Network failure.5 SSL verification failure.6 Username/password authentication failure.7 Protocol errors.8 Server issued an error response.With the exceptions of 0 and 1, the lower-numbered exit codes take precedence over higher-numbered ones, when multiple types oferrors are encountered.In versions of Wget prior to 1.12, Wget's exit status tended to be unhelpful and inconsistent. Recursive downloads would virtuallyalways return 0 (success), regardless of any issues encountered, and non-recursive fetches only returned the status corresponding tothe most recently-attempted download.FILES/etc/wgetrcDefault location of the global startup file..wgetrcUser startup file.BUGSYou are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker (see <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=wget>).Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few simple guidelines.1. Please try to ascertain that the behavior you see really is a bug. If Wget crashes, it's a bug. If Wget does not behave asdocumented, it's a bug. If things work strange, but you are not sure about the way they are supposed to work, it might well be abug, but you might want to double-check the documentation and the mailing lists.2. Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible. E.g. if Wget crashes while downloading wget -rl0 -kKE -t5


                            wget --no-parent ...